From: Alexei Turchin (alexeiturchin@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Dec 09 2008 - 08:38:04 MST
In the volume "Global catastrophic risks" you could find excellent
article of Milan Circovic "Observation selection effects and global
catastrophic risks", where he shows that we can't use information from
past records to estimating future rate of global catastrophes.
This has one more consequence which I investigate in my article: "Why
antropic principle stops to defend us. Observation selection, future
rate of natural disasters and fragility of our environment" - that is
we could be in the end of the long period of stability, and some
catastrophes may be long overdue and what is most important we could
underestimate fragility of our environment which could be on the verge
of bifurcation. It is because origination of intellectual life on the
Earth is very rare event and it means that some critical parameters
may lay near their bounds of stability and small anthropogenic
influences could start catastrophic process in this century.
"Why antropic principle stops to defend us
Observation selection, future rate of natural disasters and fragility
of our environment".
Alexei Turchin,
Russian Transhumanist movement
The previous version of this article was published on Russian in
«Problems of management of risks and safety», Works of Institute of
the System Analysis of the Russian Academy of Sciences, v. 31, 2007,
p. 306-332.
Abstract:
The main idea of this article is not only that observation selection
leads to underestimation of future rate of natural disasters, but that
our environment is much more fragile to antropic influences (like
overinflated toy balloon), also because of observation selection, and
so we should much more carefully think about global warming and deep
earth drilling.
The main idea of antropic principle (AP) is that our Universe has
qualities that allow existence of the observers. In particular this
means that global natural disasters that could prevent developing of
intellectual life on the Earth never happened here. This is true only
for the past but not for the future. So we cannot use information
about frequency of global natural disasters in the past for
extrapolation it to the future, except some special cases then we have
additional information, as Circovic shoes in his paper. Therefore, an
observer could find that all the important parametres for his/her
survival (sun, temperature, asteroid risk etc.) start altogether
inexplicably and quickly deteriorating – and possibly we could already
find the signs of this process. In a few words: The anthropic
principle has stopped to 'defend' humanity and we should take
responsibility for our survival. Moreover, as origination of
intellectual life on the Earth is very rare event it means that some
critical parameters may lay near their bounds of stability and small
antropogenic influences could start catastrophic process in this
century.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:01:03 MDT